This August, The Frida Cinema proudly presents Greenaway & Nyman, a film series celebrating four of the most iconic collaborations between filmmaker Peter Greenaway and composer Michael Nyman.  Our series opens with the film that marked the beginning of their prolific and celebrated partnership, 1982’s The Draughtsman’s Contract. This film marked the beginning of a prolific and celebrated partnership, with Nyman’s driving, baroque score becoming an essential element of Greenaway’s distinct visual style.

Set in the lush English countryside at the close of the 17th century, The Draughtsman’s Contract is a labyrinthine tale of art, seduction, and deception. When Mrs. Virginia Herbert commissions a young, arrogant artist named Mr. Neville to produce a series of detailed drawings of her estate, their arrangement includes not only payment, but certain intimate privileges. As Neville obsessively sketches the grounds with mathematical precision, he begins to uncover cryptic clues and shifting allegiances that suggest a darker intrigue beneath the estate’s manicured surface.

About GREENAWAY & NYMAN

Peter Greenaway Michael Nyman on the set of Prospero’s Books. Photo by Jacques PRAYER/Gamma-Rapho, via Getty Images)

British artist, writer, and director Peter Greenaway’s cinema is unmistakable — baroque, cerebral, and boldly theatrical, his films unfold like elaborate paintings, rich with symbolism, obsession, and wry absurdity. Equally distinctive is fellow British composer Michael Nyman, whose hypnotic, minimalist scores pulse with alternating elegance and urgency. Together, their collaborations form a sublime marriage of image and sound, a cinematic alchemy that’s as unsettling as it is exquisite. In our series Greenaway & Nyman, The Frida Cinema presents five of their most iconic collaborations, providing filmgoers a rare opportunity to immerse themselves in these signature masterpieces of sight and sound.

Our series begins with The Draughtsman’s Contract (1982), a visually lush mystery that sets the tone for Greenaway’s preoccupations with artifice, geometry, and sexual politics. The surreal A Zed & Two Noughts (1985) dives into symmetry, decay, and evolution, setting its tale of twin zoologists against time-lapse decompositions and haunting harpsichords. In Drowning by Numbers (1988), three women named Cissie Colpitts methodically dispatch their husbands in a darkly comic ballet of murder and counting. Our series ends with perhaps their most infamous collaboration, The Cook, The Thief, His Wife & Her Lover (1989), a lurid, operatic fable of gluttony and vengeance, drenched in color and scored with tragic grandeur. Each film is a sensuous, intellectual puzzle, all the more provocative and mesmerizing in the hands of Greenaway and Nyman.